With the massive exception of Wolf Blitzer few media celebrities epitomize the half inch deep, three inches wide nature of mainstream political discourse better than George Stephanopoulos. He is transparently in love with everything about himself, from his looks to whatever he does that passes for thinking. Yet he clearly considers himself something approximating a serious, well informed sage of our times. Stephanopoulos revels in, and is a heavy contributor to, the nanosecond nature of politics-as-theater. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that such things are silly at best, distracting at worst, and utterly uninteresting to the overwhelming majority of Americans. He is as loathsome an example of his kind as any you will find.
It was therefore particularly enjoyable to read the following passage from a recent London Review of Books piece about Taylor Branch’s “The Clinton Tapes”. Discussing Stephanopoulos’ breathless 1999 memoir:
Speeches got written at the last moment, policy was endlessly being reformulated, old enemies were reached out to while a train of new enemies was picked up along the way. Stephanopoulos describes how important physical proximity to the president was – having your office a few yards nearer to the Oval Office than the next person was crucial – and he lets us know that he got close.
[…]
Stephanopoulos is now a talk-show host, occasional journalist and, like everyone else, a blogger. Nevertheless, it comes as a shock reading The Clinton Tapes to discover just how little George mattered to Bill during the time when Bill meant so much to George. Stephanopoulos hardly features at all in these write-ups of a series of nearly 80 taped conversations Taylor Branch had with Clinton over the course of his presidency. On the few occasions he does get noticed it is as a minor irritant and something of a buffoon.
Oh how lovely it is when reality intrudes on the ego trips of our media elites.
I have only just begun to get into “The Clinton Tapes”, but in the wake of the hysterical reactions to the Massachusetts election this past week I found this from the book’s first chapter, discussing the lay of the land from the Clinton White House in October of 1993, particularly insightful, worrying and encouraging:
Clinton said Dole spoke of the opposition’s job not as making deals but rather making the president fail, so he could be replaced as quickly as possible. In fact, he said Dole himself started running for president within ten days of Clinton’s inauguration. “Every time he goes to Kansas,” remarked the president, “he stops off in New Hampshire on the way.”
That first sentence from the early 1990s has an eerily prescient ring here at the dawn of the 2010s, doesn’t it?
Of course the two things, sensationalist media and Red obstructionism, feed off of each other. Stephanopoulos’ brand of coverage thrives when a pseudo-political figure like Sarah Palin publicizes non-existent “death panels”. Both do a disservice to everyone but themselves when they use their fame in service to such things, but they are handsomely rewarded for it so there’s little chance they are going to stop.
That bleak sentiment is more or less the conclusion of Ken Aultta’s article in the most recent New Yorker. (Sadly it is not freely available online.) He recounts the various media missteps of the Dear Leader’s first year and paints a very grim portrait of political journalism driven by the profitable vortex of gossip gratification. The best part is right at the start when Obama, in a speech that unsurprisingly got little teevee attention, used Walter Cronkite’s funeral to call out the press for being a pack of shallow whores:
Cronkite’s standard, Obama said, was “a little bit harder to find today,” when journalism lapses into “instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories Walter disdained. . . . ‘What happened today?’ is replaced with ‘Who won today?’ The public debate cheapens.”
The great mass of citizens (a majority, I suspect) who have the good sense to not care about the Mean Girls of politics would agree. But they are not a lucrative audience. Most of them cannot afford dick pills or starter class luxury cars and while they certainly watch television it not of the political variety. Their inattentive mass counts for very little in a Nielsen survey of reportorial outlets.
In the end that is what matters, that is what drives our discourse: desirable demographics. It is the great media hypocrisy of early 21st century America, easily as illogical as the obsession with sexual “purity”. The people who watch the cable shows, who listen to the talk radio, who are fans of politics as surely as there are fans of football teams, are not representative of the body politic. They are a pathetically tiny minority. But through viewership they support the “news”, through clicks they consume the gossip, and they are the only audience that whores like Stephanopoulos care about pleasing. According to Auletta Obama is aware of this and trying to change it, but the power of the Oval Office, whatever glamour it may hold, is insufficient.
Technovangelists believe that the internet will deliver us from this vapid and uncoordinated conspiracy. I hope that they are correct. In the meantime we will have to continue the slog, continue our most precious arguments in inferior mediums. But none of that is news.
